Title: From OV to VO in Early Middle English
Series Title: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 60
Publication Year: 2002
Publisher: John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/, http://www.benjamins.nl
Book URL: http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=LA_60
Author: Carola Trips, University of Stuttgart
Hardback: ISBN: 9027227810, Pages: xiv, 359 pp., Price: EUR 120.00
Hardback: ISBN: 1588113116, Pages: xiv, 359 pp., Price: USD 120.00
Abstract:
This monograph answers the question of why English changed from an OV
to a VO language on the assumption that this change is due to
intensive language contact with Scandinavian. It shows for the first
time that the English language was much more heavily influenced by
Scandinavian than assumed before, i.e., northern Early Middle English
texts clearly show Scandinavian syntactic patterns like stylistic
fronting that can only be found today in the Modern Scandinavian
languages. Thus, it sheds new light on the force of language contact
in that it shows that a language can be heavily influenced through
contact with another language in such a way that it affects deeper
levels of language. It further gives an introduction to working with
the Penn-Helsinki-Parsed Corpus of Middle English II (PPCMEII). It
discusses the texts included in the corpus, it describes the format of
the texts, and it explains how to search the corpus with the tool
called Corpus Search. The book targets researchers in diachronic
syntax, comparative syntax and in general linguists working in the
field of generative syntax. It can further be used as an introduction
to working with the PPCMEII.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Introduction 1
2. The dialects of Middle English 7
3. Syntactic change 37
4. Word order change in EarlyMiddle English 75
5. Object movement 121
Part I: Object shift 122
6. V2 and cliticisation of subject pronouns 223
7. Stylistic fronting 275
8 Summary and conclusions 331
Appendices 335
References 339
Index 351
Lingfield(s): Generative Linguistics (Syntax)
Historical Linguistics
Syntax
Subject Language(s): English (Language code: ENG)
Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)